NRA-ILA

The Institute for Legislative Action

As the lobbying arm of NRA, the Institute for Legislative Action (ILA) is dedicated to any issue affecting firearms ownership and use. ILA works to defeat restrictive gun control legislation, to pass pro-gun reform legislation, and to educate the public about the facts concerning gun ownership.

Ignoring the Facts on Guns

March 25th, 2014

Chris W. Cox

Editorial in Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Gun control advocates frequently use discredited and false
information to push their gun control schemes. In a March 16 op-ed, Bill
Lueders of the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, for
example, cited a statistic that has been widely discredited ("Gun check legislation languishes at Capitol," Crossroads).

In addition, other untruths have been broadly pushed by gun control advocates.

One claim pushed by the Brady Campaign,
that the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) has
"stopped more than 2.1 million would-be gun purchases," sure sounds
impressive. But the fact is the vast majority of the 2.1 million people
flagged by NICS are either legitimate purchasers (who are snagged by
mistake) or criminals who are then turned loose to obtain firearms
elsewhere, rather than being prosecuted to the fullest extent of the
law.

For example,
in 2010, only 62 out of 72,659 NICS denials led to prosecutions by the
federal government — and only 13 of those prosecutions resulted in a
conviction. That's 0.0001%.

According to
Vice President Joe Biden, the reason for the Obama administration's
near-total lack of enforcement is "we simply don't have the time or the
manpower to prosecute everybody who lies on a form, that checks a wrong
box, that answers a question inaccurately." If that's the case, what's
the point of the check? Does the administration think a determined
criminal will give up a life of crime after a NICS denial?

Lueders — and
the Brady Campaign — cited a claim that 40% of gun purchases are
conducted without a background check. Even the notoriously anti-gun
Washington Post debunked that whopper, giving it a rating of "3
Pinocchios." That's because this statistic comes from a 251-person
survey conducted nearly two decades ago, in which more than
three-quarters of the firearm sales covered in the survey occurred
before background checks were mandated by federal law.

The most
recent Department of Justice survey of 1,402 convicted criminals found
that nearly 90% of them got their guns from sources that included theft,
straw purchases, family, friends and the black market. None of these
would have been blocked by NICS.

Those who
truly want to keep guns out of the wrong hands would challenge Biden and
the Obama administration on their admitted refusal to prosecute those
they know may be attempting to purchase a firearm illegally. Instead,
he's calling for a so-called universal background checks scheme, which
has more to do with registering and criminalizing lawful transfers than
with reducing violent crime.

But that's
just the point. The goal of anti-gun activists is to harass law-abiding
gun owners and manufacture public shame toward anyone who exercises
Second Amendment rights. They can try by hook or by crook, but the
National Rifle Association won't let them get away with it.